Chapter X: Part VII: Proceedings of Annual Meeting 287 (6)

The character of the fire-escapes found makes them in a number of cases practically valueless. The balconies of five had wooden floors; and not only in a large proportion of cases were balconies seriously encumbered and stairway or ladder openings covered by tenants, but in two instances trap doors were regularly fitted to these openings, the owner thus encouraging the use of the balcony as a general catch-all and storage place. Furthermore, in only three houses did all the apartments above the ground floor have access to a balcony, while in one instance, but one out of four families was provided with such means of egress. No form of fireproof construction was anywhere found, even the dumb-waiter shafts in the higher buildings, well known to be one of the most common paths by which fire spreads, being almost without exception of wood.

In regard to lighting and ventilation, the facts are less easily grouped. The buildings being seldom of a depth to encroach seriously upon the yards, we find, with the exception of a very few of the higher houses, that nearly all of the kitchens and general living-rooms open upon the yard or street and are thus adequately lighted. In the converted dwellings, and in all houses occupied by but one family on each floor, a large proportion of bedrooms also are open to the outer air. But in the three or four-story buildings erected originally for tenement uses, and furnishing accommodations for two families or more on a floor, a light bedroom is more nearly the exception than the rule. The typical interior room is lighted by a window to the outer living-room or a public hall, these windows seldom having more than five square feet of glazed surface, and more frequently an area of from three to four square feet. One thousand and eighty-four such rooms were noted in the course of the investigation; while—a still more serious evil—399 rooms were found which had no window at all, and in most cases not even a transom opening into another room.

Light and air-shafts were found in only a small proportion of the tenement houses investigated; and a light and air-shaft which is more than the merest travesty of its respectable name is emphatically an exception. The typical shaft is a triangular or oblong niche in the outer wall, with an area of from five to twenty square feet; an occasional variation being found in a square shaft of about the same area, let into the interior of the house and covered in most cases by a skylight. Below the top story such shafts furnish practically no light, while tenants bore almost unvarying witness that windows upon them were uniformly kept closed. A single whiff of the pent-up air within their narrow walls is quite sufficient to convince one of the wisdom of such disregard of their presence; and one feels no surprise in reading the evidence of chemists and physicians as to the positive injury to health wrought by pretended ventilation of this sort—evidence which has led to the giving of the suggestive name of culture tubes to such shafts. Among evils of sanitation only a few of the most serious can be touched upon. Most conspicuous and widespread of all is that of the foul and ill-smelling privy vault. Seventy-five per cent of the houses investigated furnish no toilet accommodations save these objectionable structures in the yard. The vaults are in the main sewer-connected, one block and part of another in District III being the only sections in which no street sewer is laid, though unsewered vaults were found in small numbers elsewhere. But a sewer connection is in a large proportion of cases a most illusory blessing. The great mass of solid matter frequently remains after the liquids have run off to the sewer, and its decomposition renders the air of the yard, upon which the rear rooms depend, many times almost intolerable. In two cases school-sinks—modified privies, with metal vaults in which water stands—were discovered in cellars; but as the water was changed, according to the testimony of tenants, but once a week, these cannot be said to offer many advantages over the ordinary privy. Among the 368 water-closets in use in the remaining houses, the old and objectionable pan closets number sixty-one; while numerous water-closet compartments are either entirely unventilated or have windows only to halls or rooms, and in a number of cases, especially on the top floor of five-story buildings, the water-flush is wholly inadequate to cleanse the bowl.

A serious evil is also found in the location and condition of household sinks. In seventy of the houses investigated all such sinks were located in the public hall, while in fifty-five other houses sinks were so located on one or more floors. Nearly every such sink is used by two families. In one block, chosen at haphazard from those of the Italian district, sixty apartments were found whose occupants were obliged so to share their sink; while fifteen other apartments were provided with but one sink to every three or four apartments. Furthermore, eight houses were found in which, in flat defiance of a city ordinance, no water at all was furnished indoors. One row of four such houses, containing in all twenty-two apartments, was provided with but two hydrants in the common yard, one hydrant serving for ten, the other for twelve apartments.

The collection of statistics as to the plumbing of sinks was not at first attempted, but was taken up as the result of an observation of conditions in the earlier blocks investigated. Eleven hundred and sixty-two sinks, located in four blocks of District I, and in the six blocks of Districts II and III, were examined. Of these only 10 per cent were properly trapped and vented; 68 per cent were trapped but not vented—a far from satisfactory state of affairs, especially where as in many cases traps were so small or otherwise defective as to be practically useless; 10 per cent were neither trapped nor vented, the pipes thus offering free passage to the contaminated sewer air; 12 per cent were boarded up solidly, so that the waste-pipes could not be examined—an almost sure sign that the concealed plumbing is of the oldest and worst type.

One serious element in the insanitary conditions of the districts investigated, which, unlike those just mentioned, cannot primarily be charged to the householder, is found in the character of the land upon which a large part of lower Jersey City is built. Only six of the sixteen blocks investigated are composed entirely of original solid ground. Five blocks in District I were in greater or less degree formed by the filling in of marsh land or the extension of the water front. All of District II, and nearly all of two blocks of District III, were so formed.[13]

The significance of these facts appears when we realize that land so made is largely intermingled with refuse matter, and, still more important, is generally damp and is subject to periodic risings of tidewater. In a large proportion of the houses built upon such land, observations of the investigator, supplemented by the testimony of tenants, proves that the water in cellars unprotected, as are nearly all, by water-proof flooring, stands at times to a depth of several inches. Sewage is thus frequently washed back into yards and cellars, first floor apartments are rendered damp and unhealthful, and nauseating odors suggest the serious danger to health which such a condition brings upon the entire house. Fortunately the cellar-dwelling evil is not a prevalent one in Jersey City; yet one instance is recalled where a family paying for four rooms in the basement and first floor had been obliged to vacate the lower two rooms entirely—the men of the family wading through water knee-deep to rescue the kitchen stove.

One of the most serious evils from which the poorer classes suffer is that of overcrowded apartments. As was anticipated from the facts brought to light by investigations in other American cities, this evil was found to be most prevalent among the poorest foreign population, especially the Poles and Italians, and is largely due to the custom of taking so called boarders—really, in most cases, lodgers, who provide their own bedding and pay in the neighborhood of two dollars a month.

There are two ways of measuring overcrowding in apartments; by number of individuals per room, and by cubic air space per individual. To secure perfectly accurate results, it is of course necessary to discover just how many rooms in a given apartment are occupied for sleeping purposes and how many persons sleep in each. This may seem a simple matter, but in practice reliable results are not only very difficult, but in many cases impossible to secure, save by a night inspection. Not only must allowance be made for very general under-statement of the number of boarders taken, but in a large proportion of cases either no answers at all or wholly unsatisfactory answers can be obtained to questions as to the distribution of members of the family and of boarders at night. Under these circumstances it has seemed best, instead of attempting to state the number of individuals sleeping in each room and the precise cubic air space afforded by that room to each, to give the ratio of number of occupants to entire number of rooms in each apartment, and the cubic air space per individual afforded by that apartment as a whole. Only rough indications of the degree of overcrowding at night are of course given by this method, but it has at least the advantage of greater accuracy so far as it goes than could fairly be claimed for one seemingly more precise.

Applying the method of measurement by cubic air space to the 2,154 apartments investigated, we find that in 65 per cent of them each occupant has an allowance of 600 cubic feet of air or more. Living conditions in most of these apartments are fair, and in many good; yet some of the most disgraceful cases of overcrowding were found among them—as in one apartment, where in a single large room two little girls of about twelve years slept, together with a varying number of male boarders. The remaining 35 per cent of apartments afford less than 600 cubic feet of air space per occupant. This means in nearly all cases a serious degree of overcrowding; since if bedrooms alone are occupied at night such an allowance for the whole apartment means actually on an average less than 400 cubic feet, and often less than 300 or even 200 cubic feet for each person; while if the crowding compels the use of the kitchen for sleeping purposes, other evils hardly less serious are added to those of limited air space. Such being the meaning of the figures given, it becomes evident that in the 199 apartments, 9 per cent of all, in which there were found to be less than 400 cubic feet of air space to each occupant in the apartment as a whole, very serious danger to health exists. It is below the limit of 400 cubic feet per adult, with a smaller allowance for children, that government interference has generally been authorized, where authorized at all; as is notably the case in Glasgow, where the law is enforced by an especially efficient system of night inspection, and among American cities in New York.

The other test of overcrowding, by ratio of number of persons to number of rooms, while a less accurate means of estimating effect on health, furnishes a more accurate indication of the relation of overcrowding to standards of decency. An example typical of many cases met with will make this distinction clear. Suppose two large high-ceiled rooms with a total cubic contents of 3,500 cubic feet, occupied by eight people. Each person has then more than the minimum of 400 cubic feet; yet the absence of any possibility of privacy or decency of living involved where men and women boarders, parents and growing children make up the eight, need not be dwelt upon. It is evident that four rooms with an aggregate contents of less than 3,200 cubic feet might be occupied by the same eight persons with perhaps greater danger to health from limited breathing space, but with certainly better opportunities for separation by sexes.

If we apply this second method of measurement, we find that in 24 per cent of the total number of apartments there are two persons or more to each room. Such apartments may fairly be classed as overcrowded; since either every room is occupied for sleeping purposes, or if one room is reserved for kitchen and living-room, the bedrooms are shared by a minimum average of two and two-thirds, three or four persons each, according as the number of rooms in the apartment is four, three or two.[14] To appreciate what this means it is of course necessary to realize that few bedrooms in such apartments contain more than 800 cubic feet, while a large proportion are dark interior rooms containing from 600 to 400 cubic feet or even less. These facts having been pointed out, it is unnecessary further to emphasize the seriousness of the state of affairs, where, as in 196 apartments, 9 per cent of the total number, the ratio of number of occupants to number of rooms rises as high as 2.5 or more.

Space will not permit of an extended comparison of these conditions of overcrowding with those revealed by similar investigations in other cities. It is interesting, however, to note in passing that the average number of individuals per room in the districts investigated is higher than the average number of occupants per room in the 9,859 apartments covered by the recent investigation of the City Homes Association in Chicago; the former being 1.35, and the latter 1.28 persons. While averages do not form the most satisfactory basis of comparison, a difference so marked as this unquestionably indicates a greater degree of overcrowding in the Jersey City than in the Chicago districts.

Enough has been said, it is believed, to show that serious housing problems demand solution in Jersey City. While the investigation covered the living environment of but 10,179 persons out of a total city population of 206,433, it may yet fairly claim to have some representative value. The districts investigated of course present conditions different in some respects from those of the city as a whole. Thus—to use a method of comparison too rough to have any but a suggestive value—while but 28 per cent of the total population of the city are foreigners, 84 per cent of the heads of families whose apartments were investigated are foreign born. Along with this large proportion of the poorest foreign population go unquestionably especially bad conditions of overcrowding, and in many respects of sanitary neglect; though such is not the case with faults of housing construction pure and simple. Nevertheless the accusation that an unfairly dark and harrowing picture has been presented cannot justly be brought; since on the one hand many tenement houses of the best type were included, as is shown by a range of monthly rents between extremes of $17 and $3 per apartment; while on the other, large numbers of blocks as bad in character as any of those investigated could be pointed out in other parts of the city. The hope of furnishing data upon which a movement for reform might safely base its demands was the determining incentive to the investigation; but this direct practical aim has by no means obscured the sociological and scientific interests involved. If the results obtained shall on the one hand be used as a point of departure for social effort, and on the other be judged a real though small contribution to the literature of the housing problem, the ends sought will have been fully attained.

IV. The Child Labor Problem

CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION

By MRS. FLORENCE KELLEY

Secretary National Consumers’ League

It is most desirable that the present widespread agitation for child labor legislation may achieve permanent results of a uniform character. Such laws as now exist are alike in no two states; they are enforced differently when they are enforced at all; they are uniform only in their failure to afford adequate protection to the rising generation of the working class.

It is the aim of this paper to set forth some essential points of an effective child labor law efficiently enforced; for whatever the local differences of industrial conditions may be, certain fundamental needs of childhood are constant and child labor legislation must ultimately be framed with regard to these.

This fact is somewhat recognized in the statutes already enacted; for all these begin with a restriction upon the age at which the child may begin to work. This minimal age has varied from ten years to fifteen, differing in some states for boys and for girls, while the statutes prescribing it have been weakened in some states by exemptions and strengthened in others by educational requirements. The fundamental provision of all child labor legislation has always been the prohibition of work before a specified birthday.

Akin to the restriction of the age of employment is the restriction of the hours of work. The former secures to the child a fixed modicum of childhood; the latter assures to the adolescent certain leisure, all too little, for growth and development.

No one law can be selected as containing all the provisions needed or even as containing all the provisions now in force. It is not possible to say to students of the subject, “The law of Massachusetts should be copied everywhere,” for the laws of Ohio and Illinois contain single provisions in advance of that of Massachusetts.

Among the best child labor laws in the United States are those of Illinois and Indiana, which are almost identical. In Illinois no child under the age of fourteen years can be legally employed in any mine, manufacturing establishment, factory or workshop, mercantile institution, store, office, or laundry. The Indiana law adds, to the foregoing list, renovating works, bakeries and printing offices. This prohibition is absolute throughout the year, admitting no exemptions or exceptions. Herein lies the superiority of these laws. Under the New York law, children at work in stores are exempt from restrictions during half of December—from December 15 to December 31—and also during the vacations of the public schools, when they may be employed from the age of thirteen years everywhere outside of the factories, which happily they may not enter before the fourteenth birthday. This exemption in New York has been given such elastic construction that children have been employed on Saturdays and even on school-days out of school-hours.

The laws of Illinois and Indiana are humane; they set the highest age limit without exemptions yet attained; they are equitable since they place mine owners, manufacturers and merchants in the same position in relation to this particular source of cheap labor. The employment of children under fourteen years of age is prohibited to all three sets of employers alike.

Treating these laws as standard or normal, for purposes of comparison, the law of Pennsylvania, for instance, is seen to fall below, because under it children may work in certain mines at twelve years and in factories at thirteen years of age; while lowest in the scale among all the Northern and Middle states stands New Jersey, whose child labor law permits boys to work at twelve and exempts all children, on grounds of poverty, at discretion of the factory inspectors.

_Exemptions._

From the foregoing brief statement it is clear that the subject of exemptions is a varied and complicated one. The most insidious form of exemption, and therefore perhaps the most dangerous, is that prescribed in the law of Wisconsin. Under it, no child may be employed under the age of fourteen years in manufacture or commerce, unless it is exempted on grounds of poverty by a judge of a local court. In practice, a judge has no time to investigate the economic condition of hundreds of families; hence he follows the recommendation of the deputy factory inspector. This overworked officer is drawn away from his proper duties to perform an economic investigation for which he possesses no especial fitness. His own work suffers. Children are exempted from school attendance and permitted to work, who more than any other children in the community need education because of the poverty or shiftlessness of their parents. Too often, drunken fathers are encouraged to further drunkenness because their young children, under exemption, are earning money which the parents spend. Finally, this exemption rests upon the pernicious principle that a young child under fourteen years of age may be burdened with the support of itself or its family.

It is not a legitimate function of the judiciary to investigate the poverty of individual families. It is not a legitimate function of the factory inspectors to investigate family life. Both officers are interrupted in the performance of their legitimate duties by every attempt to perform this alien task. Moreover, children under fourteen years of age are undesirable additions to the body of wage-earners, pressing by their competition upon the wages of their seniors and therefore tending to produce in other families the same poverty which serves as a pretext for their own exemption. The number of exempted children, under such a provision, tends to increase continuously, because greedy and pauperized parents are tempted to follow the example of the really needy, in urging applications for exemptions.

_Reinforcements._

Besides being free from all the undermining effects of exemption clauses, the child labor laws of Illinois and Indiana profit by several reinforcing clauses. Chief among these is the requirement that children under sixteen years and over fourteen years must keep on file in the office of the place of employment an affidavit of the parent or guardian, stating the date and place of birth of the child. In Indiana, this must state also that the child can read and write the English language. While some parents are undoubtedly guilty of perjury, and others carelessly take the oath perfunctorily administered by a notary public, thousands of honest people are deterred by the requirement of the affidavit from sending their children to work before reaching the fourteenth birthday.

Employers must produce, on demand of factory inspectors, affidavits for all children under sixteen years of age in their employ. The penalty prescribed for failure to do this is the same as for employing a child under the age of fourteen years. The value of this provision for the protection of the children depends wholly upon the policy of the inspectors. If every failure to produce the affidavit is followed by immediate prosecution, manufacturers become extremely cautious about employing young children; children under fourteen years of age virtually cease to be employed; and the number of those employed under sixteen years of age diminishes because many employers refuse to be troubled with affidavits, inspections and prosecutions. On the other hand, employers of large numbers of children find it profitable to make one clerk responsible for the presence in the office of an affidavit for every child between the ages of fourteen and sixteen years. In these cases, the children who have affidavits acquire a slight added value, are somewhat less likely to be dismissed for trifling reasons, and become somewhat more stable in their employment.

Where, however, inspectors fear to prosecute systematically, lest they be removed from office, the provision requiring an affidavit to be produced by the employer, on demand of an inspector, is not rigorously enforced; children soon come to be employed upon their verbal assurance that they are fourteen years of age, and the protection which might be derived from this very useful reinforcing clause is lost for the children under fourteen years of age, as well as for the older ones.

A farther reinforcement of the prohibition of employment of children under fourteen years of age is the authority conferred by the Illinois law upon inspectors to demand a certificate of physical fitness for children who may seem unfit for their work. This provision enforced with energy and discretion can be made, in the case of children conspicuously undersized, largely to counteract the tendency to perjury on the part of parents, besides relieving healthy children from overstrain of many kinds. The difficulties encountered are chiefly two:—physicians grant certificates without visiting the place of employment. This occurs quite uniformly to the disgrace of the profession. Physicians also grant certificates, in many cases, without careful examination of eyes, heart, lungs and spinal column of the child, simply upon the parent’s statement of poverty. To make this reinforcement thoroughly effective, every factory inspection staff should include a physician, preferably two, a man and a woman, appointed expressly to follow up the children and the conditions under which they work.

_Educational Tests._

Several states require that children under sixteen years of age must be able to read and write simple sentences in the English language, before being employed. This is of the highest value in those states which receive large streams of immigration from Europe. In New York, every year, numbers of children are dismissed from factories by order of factory inspectors, because the children cannot read; while in Massachusetts, French Canadian children find school attendance at a high premium because of the difficulty of securing employment without it. The influence of the foreign voting constituency has defeated in several states, for several years past, the effort to secure a statutory requirement of ability to read and write English, or a specified attendance at school, as a prerequisite for work on the part of children under sixteen years of age. This is conspicuously true of Illinois, where such a provision was defeated in the legislatures of 1893, 1895 and 1897.

The most powerful reinforcement of the child labor law is a compulsory school attendance law effectively enforced. For want of this, the child labor law of Illinois suffers severely. The school attendance law requires children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to attend school sixteen weeks, of which twelve must be consecutive. Children under ten years of age must enter school in September, children under twelve years must enter school not later than New Year’s. Meagre as these provisions are, they are not uniformly and effectively enforced by the local school boards; and the state factory inspectors are therefore burdened with frequent prosecutions of employers because children under fourteen years of age are sent to work by parents who should be rigorously prosecuted by the school attendance officers.

In Indiana, the reinforcement afforded by the state truancy law is of great value, for children must attend school to the age of fourteen years, throughout the term of the school district in which they live, generous provision being made for truant officers. This difference accounts, perhaps, for the fact that Indiana has but three and one-half thousand children under the age of sixteen years at work, compared with nineteen thousand such children in Illinois; and this despite the rapid development of the “Gas Belt” in Indiana, where the temptation is very great for parents to put excessively young children to work with the help of perjured affidavits. Truant officers, watching young children, from the eighth to the fourteenth birthday, every day of the school term, are the best preventive alike of perjury by parents and of child labor. They constitute the best possible reinforcement of the child labor law.

The contrasted practice of the neighboring states of Indiana and Illinois, in this respect, is so marked that, unless the policy of Illinois be radically changed in the near future, it is reasonable to expect that, despite the excellent child labor law, the number of children at work under the age of sixteen years must continue to double at intervals of five years, as it has done in the past—the recruits being largely drawn from the ranks of the children under the legal age for work.

In Boston, the very enlightened firm of merchants known as Filene’s have long made it a rule to employ no person who is not a graduate of the grammar grades of the public schools. In two cases known to the writer, girls aged respectively eighteen and sixteen years applied for work, but were not engaged because they had not completed the school requirement. They found employment elsewhere while attending the graded evening schools of Boston in preparation for service at Filene’s. It is reasonable to expect that this method of securing efficient help will be increasingly followed by public-spirited employers interested in placing a premium upon school attendance, until at last legislators may feel justified in specifying some one grade of the schools below which the pupil may not leave to begin working.

_The Hours of Labor._

Among the most advanced restrictions upon the hours of labor of children is that of New Jersey, which prohibits all persons, men, women and children, alike, from working in manufacturing establishments longer than fifty-five (55) hours in any week, or after one o’clock on Saturday. This provision applies throughout the year. Massachusetts and Rhode Island prohibit the employment of women of any age and of youths under eighteen years, longer than fifty-eight hours in any week, or ten hours in one day, or after nine at night or before six in the morning.

These laws have the advantage of precision. They require that the hours of work of the persons concerned must be posted conspicuously, and that the posted hours shall constitute the working day—work beyond the posted hours constituting a violation of the law—thus rendering the enforcement of the law simple and easy.

The statute of Utah prohibits all persons from working in mines, smelters and factories longer than eight hours in one day and forty-eight hours in one week. This statute has been sustained by the Supreme Court at Washington, in the decision in the case of Holden _vs._ Hardy, 1896. It does not, at present, affect any considerable number of children, because child labor hardly exists in Utah. But with the development of manufacture, now proceeding with startling rapidity, the value of this enlightened law for the children who must inevitably find employment is quite beyond computation. And as a precedent for similar legislation elsewhere, this statute and the extremely strong decision of the Supreme Court at Washington sustaining the validity of the statute are of epoch-making importance.

_Night Work of Children._

The extent to which children are employed at night is not generally recognized. In any state in which such employment is not explicitly prohibited, it is very general in all branches of industry in which children are employed by day. Glassworks, nut and bolt works, tin can factories, furniture factories, cutleries, and scores of miscellaneous industries employ boys regularly at night. Girls are regularly employed in garment and candy factories during the busy season; and in some factories this work continues all through the year, as in the cotton mills of Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas. Wherever the prohibition is not explicit and sweeping, the night work of children is the rule, not the exception. In Illinois and Indiana boys are not prohibited from working at night, and are regularly employed in the glassworks in both states under circumstances of great hardship. In Indiana, girls are forbidden to work after ten o’clock; but Illinois, cruelly belated in this respect, merely restricts the work of children under sixteen years of age to sixty hours in any week, and ten hours in one day, failing to proscribe night work even for girls. It is, accordingly, very common. Even in Boston, where the hours of labor of boys under eighteen years engaged in manufacture and other forms of commerce are strictly limited, a recent attempt to pass an ordinance requiring that newsboys under fourteen years of age shall not sell papers on the streets after eight o’clock at night failed utterly, and small boys are to be seen upon the streets at all hours. The place of honor in the matter of legislation prohibiting night work for children properly belongs to Ohio, which provides that minors under eighteen years of age, may not be employed after seven o’clock at night.

_Children Not Yet Protected._

Large numbers of working children remain wholly unprotected by legislation. Not only have the four great cotton manufacturing states, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas, defeated all bills presented to their legislatures for the purpose of protecting young children, but in the North, also, newsboys, bootblacks, peddlers, vendors and the thousands of children employed in the tenement houses of New York and Chicago, and in the sweat-shops of Philadelphia, remain wholly outside of the law’s protection, so far as statutory regulation of the conditions of their work is concerned. The problem of abolishing the overwork of school children in tenement houses, under the sweating system, appears at present insoluble except by a prohibition of all tenement house work.

_Enforcement._

To secure the enforcement of child labor legislation, there are needed factory inspectors, both men and women, equipped with ample powers and supplied with adequate funds for traveling and other expenses. These inspectors need good general education, long experience, and vigorous public opinion reinforcing their efforts. Massachusetts enjoys the unique distinction, among the American states, of possessing a large staff of factory inspectors meeting all these requirements; and Massachusetts is, accordingly, the only state of which it may be confidently asserted that its child labor law is uniformly and effectively enforced at all times and in all its provisions. A faithful officer serving a full quarter-century at the head of the department, with subordinates equally assured of permanent tenure of office during good behavior, has been able fearlessly and intelligently to enforce the laws securing to the children of Massachusetts fourteen full years of childhood, with opportunity for school life, followed by safety of life, limb and health after entering upon the years of work.

In all the other states it is extremely difficult for an inspector who faithfully enforces the law to retain his position. The interests which oppose such legislation and object to its enforcement, are enormously powerful and are thoroughly organized. The people who procure the enactment of child labor laws are usually working people unacquainted with the technical details of the work of inspection; busy in the effort to earn their own living; not able to keep vigilant watch upon the work of the inspectors, the creation of whose office they achieve. Thus the officials are subjected to pressure in one direction only. If they are idly passive, they may be allowed to vegetate in office several years. If they are aggressively faithful to the oath of office, enforcing the law by prosecuting offenders against its provisions, the children who profit by this are unable to reward their benefactors; the working people who obtained the creation of the office have no arts of bringing pressure to bear effectively to reward faithfulness in public service by appointed officers; while the offending employers are amply able to punish what they decry as officious overactivity, if they do not go farther and charge persecution and blackmail. For these reasons it may almost be stated as a general proposition that the more lax the officer, the longer his term of office; and the history of the departments of factory inspection, the country over, sadly substantiates the statement.

The recent startling revelations of non-enforcement of the laws intended to protect young children from exhausting overwork in the glass factories in New Jersey merely intimate what will be found true in every state in which there is not a powerfully organized, compact body of public opinion alert to insist upon the retention of competent officers, the removal of incompetent ones, and the uniform, consistent enforcement of all the provisions of the child labor laws.

To form in every state, among the purchasers of the products of manufacture, a body of alert, enlightened public opinion, keen to watch the officers to whom is entrusted the duty of enforcing child labor laws, rewarding with support and appreciation faithful officials and calling attention to derelictions from duty on the part of the mere politicians among them, this is an important part of the duty of the National Consumers’ League.

CHILD LABOR IN THE DEPARTMENT STORE

By FRANKLIN N. BREWER

General Manager Wanamaker Store, Philadelphia

The topic assigned me, “Child Labor in (so called) Department Stores,” interests us, I take it, from but one point of view: that of the education and development of the child into the man or woman who shall contribute and receive a normal share of the world’s good growth in life, liberty and happiness.

I cannot claim comprehensive thought or research, under this topic, and my paper must be the brief and superficial one of a man whose too short days are full of the work of the builder rather than the study of the architect.

If my coming before you is justified at all, it must be by the simple statement I am able to make of how one establishment,[15] a typical one of the class under consideration, is trying to meet its responsibility for its children.

First entrance into the employ of this house is, to the extent possible, with a clear understanding between parent, or guardian, and the employer, that the child’s business career shall continue with the same house, at least until maturity in years and efficiency in some distinct branch of the business shall have been reached.

Following our State law, thirteen years is the minimum age. The smaller boys begin as “cash boys.” Girls are not given this work, positions of less freedom being considered safer for them. The girls up to, usually, seventeen years of age, and the boys, other than cash boys, usually, from sixteen to eighteen, are engaged directly in the general corps of the junior employees—we call it “The Cadet Corps”—and into this corps the cash boys come by promotion. Except at Christmas, the cash boys will average two hundred in number; the cadets four hundred, of whom about one hundred are girls. These six hundred young people are assigned to duty in the various departments and divisions of the business, according to natural aptitude and fitness, and are under the direction of their respective department or section heads; but always, also, and until graduation from the Cadet Corps, they are under the care and discipline of the chief of the corps and a lady assistant. The young people are not lost sight of individually, but are known and studied by the managers with view to advancement according to capacity and natural abilities.

Cultivation of good manners, neatness, elevated personal habits, the general requirements of the store service, lessons from their individual experiences, etc., are considered with them individually and at general meetings, and are emphasized by a system of monthly averages bearing upon questions of promotion and increase of salary. To illustrate: Each of the smaller boys (the cash boys) has his record card which he must carry for a month. It is no small departure from small-boy nature, simply to have and hold this card during a month without a forbidden accumulation of dirt and damage upon it. One of the early signs of progress, after the adoption of this feature of our plan, was an increased average whiteness and remaining area in the cards surrendered at the month’s end. This card epitomizes the boy’s early business life and he reverences it and guards it. On one side are rules to be committed to memory, but this is merely incidental. The other is the serious side, where an array of spaces gradually fill up, like the rising of the tide. Weekly ratings by his section manager for neatness, promptness, truthfulness, etc.; a weekly rating at morning “inspection,” by his general chief; daily strokes of the pencil (if occasion require) for misconduct or neglect of duty—“bluies” the boys call these latter marks and there is no levity or disrespect in the term. Protest against what is felt to be an undeserved “bluie” is made to his chief, or even to the general manager, with all the earnestness of an appeal to the Supreme Court, and, needless to say, such appeals are patiently entertained and decided with honest effort after justice. Upon these cards, also, are entered the monthly figures given for the boys’ school-work. The average of all the ratings is the “store average” and the misconduct marks (“bluies”) reckon so much off. The card goes home for inspection and signing by parent or guardian. Upon the “store average” depend increase of salary and promotion. If advance in salary is not won reasonably soon (six weeks or two months usually bring the first upward step) the conclusion is apt to be reached that the boy is unfitted for our service and he is dropped from the ranks. The simple expedient of these cards, and that which they represent, secures in discipline what the harsh word and impulsive discharge never could secure, and a month or two bring about in the little “raw recruit” a surprising improvement.

I mention these details as illustrative of the spirit, character and thoroughness with which, to the best of our ability, the problems of the discipline and development of our young people are met, along their whole course from first entrance into the business up to graduation into the ranks of men and women. And this line of procedure is simple recognition of the fact that these are children still, whose characters are forming, and that faults and defects, which in man or woman might require discharge, in the child simply demand correction.

The boys above the cash boy grade, and the girls, are placed, as early as wisely possible (depending upon their own developing tendencies and the business conditions), where some distinct branch of the business, or class of merchandise, will be learned thoroughly. Stock boy, salesman, stock-head, buyer’s assistant, is the usual line of advancement in merchandising. Development in clerical lines makes the bookkeeper, the auditor, the office assistant, the stenographer. In trades lines grow up among us, the milliner, the dressmaker, the paper shade and flower worker, the plate engraver and printer, the designer, draughtsman, decorator, show-card painter, the mechanic in repair of bicycles, dolls, and so on. Exceedingly numerous and varied are the paths open, and in so far as possible an early and definite selection and patient reasonable progress along some one of these paths are insisted upon. Meanwhile salaries are advanced systematically according to a minimum scale which is increased as progress above the average and promotion to higher duties may mark the course of the individual.

Does the program, thus far, sound too serious and strict for normal happiness and hopefulness in the children? See our young people and you will find the reverse to be true. Granted a child, normal in body and mind, happily busy and interested in duties of genuine importance to and among other busy people, and the question of training in the business proper answers itself: the child learns, absorbs, grows by the easy process of nature. His capital knowledge, as a business man, becomes to him like the mud on the carpet at Willie’s home: “I didn’t bring it into the house, mamma; it just stuck to my shoes and came in itself.” But the youthful business students of to-day require for normal development more than the round of duty of a succession of business days in a fixed place can supply, and more than the average home and home circle of friends and interests of the working boy or girl do supply.

And so we have found it practicable to bring into the business lives of our young people most of the activities usual in the schools. The smaller boys are organized into school and military companies. Each company assembles in the school-rooms, on the fifth floor of the store building, two mornings in the week, where regular instruction is given in arithmetic, grammar, spelling, writing, composition and singing. On two other mornings they have the setting-up exercises and drill of the school of the soldier, with some other physical culture features. The boys elect their own military officers, save, of course, their chief, and these officers become successful disciplinarians, retaining well the respect and obedience of their companies. A very successful fife, bugle and drum corps, composed of the boys themselves, is a feature of this branch of their organization. As fairly indicating the standard of these special activities, let me mention here that this fife, bugle and drum corps has twice marched at the head of the combined Boys’ Brigades of Philadelphia, and has been pronounced the best junior organization of the sort in the city.

Our girls have their school organization, also, each division having two mornings in the week. The branches taught are those above mentioned and also business correspondence, stenography and typewriting, and bookkeeping. Attention is given to singing and physical culture, while an elocution class and a mandolin club are successful outgrowths of this branch of the store school.

The older boys, in number about three hundred, have supper in the store and remain for their school, two evenings in a week. The branches taught are arithmetic, spelling, writing, commercial correspondence, English, stenography, bookkeeping, metric system, mechanical and free-hand drawing, rapid calculation. Military and gymnastic training are given, and as outgrowths of the school are a club for debate and literary exercises, an orchestra, a field music band, a mandolin club, a glee club, an elocution and dramatic class, and a minstrel troupe. Monthly report of the standing and progress of each pupil is made to the parents.

Each of these three branches of the store school has its separate annual commencement exercises conducted similarly to those of other schools and not falling below the latter in general merit. Association Hall has been used in later years for this purpose, but is now much too small for the gathering of the parents and friends interested. Certificates (they call them diplomas) are given to the graduates, but these papers have double significance. They testify to the attainment of a certain standard in the school-work proper and also to the actual number of years of satisfactory service in the business, with promotion from the Cadet Corps to a position in the regular ranks of some one of the store departments—equivalent to a stepping out of the ranks of the business boy or girl into those of the business man or woman.

These graduates have organized themselves into Alumni and Alumnæ Associations and maintain their fellowship, principally in social, but partly in educative work. The school button or pin and the alumni pin prove that these young folks are quite as human as those of other schools and colleges. The standard of class-work done, while perhaps less in quantity for the same length of time, does not, in quality, seem to fall below the standard of other schools. The business training, the business authority and the fact that excellence in school-work is also an important element in business promotion, all give the teacher an advantage, and the scholar an incentive greater than in ordinary schools, and these substantially offset the disadvantage of shorter class-hours. With justifiable pride we call the schools, collectively, the “J. W. C. I.,” “John Wanamaker Commercial Institute.” The “Junior Savings Fund” is another feature of the young people’s organizations of the store, largely taken advantage of and helpfully stimulating to habits of care with money. A summer camp, the outfit for which is owned by the boys, provides for the vacation of many.

The results are very manifest. Jacob Riis says, “the small boy is a boiler with steam up all the time, and if authority sits on the safety-valve there is bound to be an explosion.” We have but few explosions. There is so much of varied and interesting demand upon his activities that our future business man has but little time to scheme out mischief and practically no surplus steam to explode. The incentive to faithful doing of his best is strong. Participation in the actual work of the business daily is the broadest end of school-work. Beginning early and with awakening interest and ambition, the children are in less danger of developing wrong habits, temptation to dishonesty, a sullen or resistful spirit toward those in control, and many another cause by which a naturally well-equipped child fails to fulfill the promise of his childhood.

While children here are children still, yet I know not of an equal number of young people gathered together with an equal standard in present character and ability and promise of future success and usefulness. As would be supposed, such care in the early training of the young people necessarily and naturally carries with it the advancing of these people as the years go on, so that what is practically a system of civil service promotion has resulted, and the higher positions are continually filling with those who have grown up in the business from childhood.

To be sure, it often happens that a young man, having made himself fit for a larger position than is open to him at the time in this his business home, goes out with our approval to some other establishment which needs a chief and bids for him, but, on the other hand, it is true that no young man or woman, having won a foothold in the regular store service and continuing faithfully to do his or her best, need look elsewhere for advancement or a business future.

Sometimes these changes to other service are invited before we think the young man or woman fully qualified, and in any case much is risked in the search elsewhere for sudden and uncertain advancement.

From these conditions develop three important features of modern business life: First: A fair equivalent for the apprentice system still so strong in the Old World, and for want of which our young business men and mechanics have suffered in comparison with Old World competitors, in point of thoroughness and detail knowledge; second: civil service promotion; and third: service and disability pension.

May I presume further upon your patience with an additional question or two? Are we prepared to say that better results than these I have tried to indicate are observable in those trained solely in academic courses? It is too large a question for me to attempt to answer. An answer is, however, suggested by R. T. Crane in a pamphlet issued in 1901 in Chicago, entitled “An Investigation as to the Utility of Academic Education for Young Men Who Have to Earn Their Own Living and Who Expect to Pursue a Commercial Life.” Mr. Crane comes, among other conclusions, to this: “The truth of the matter is that, when it comes to considering an applicant for a position, few of these gentlemen (employers in various lines) will be found to pay any attention to the amount of knowledge he may have of Greek, Latin, literature, etc., or care a straw about the mental drill and discipline or the well-rounded character that he may have acquired through a course at college. What they are particularly interested in knowing is whether he understands their business and can promote it. This is all that has any weight with them in the selection of help.”

And further, “The great majority of our strongest and most successful men in the country to-day came from farms and villages and obtained very little education.... In my opinion, few of them would have been anywhere near so successful in business had they gone to college, for their success was largely due to the fact, which was impressed upon them in the early part of their career, that they would have to struggle if they expected to succeed.

“I feel quite sure that if the men who have been successful in business were asked whether they regretted starting in business at the time they did, in place of going to college and taking the chances of afterward being able to gain the success which they have achieved, all would answer in the negative.... I think it can be safely said that the great men at the head of our railroads are the strongest business men the world has ever produced, and so far as I have been able to ascertain, not one of them is a consistent believer in college education.

“Certainly none of them have expressed in their letters any regret on account of not having received such education themselves.

“On the contrary, Mr. Roswell Miller remarks that he spent one year in college, and considers it fortunate that he did not spend more.”

Without depreciating the value of a college course, our business experience tends to the conclusion that men and women trained up from youth in the business are the most successful; that length of service, with its unconscious absorption of and self-adjustment to the principles and needs of the business, will carry a given degree of natural capacity to a higher point of efficiency and success than an originally greater degree of capacity will be likely to reach by the shorter road of business training begun in maturer years.